For 20 years now the BINZ39 Foundation has initiated and funded a wide-ranging programme of studio visits, exchange programmes, exhibitions, interdisciplinary events and contact networks involving artists, musicians, theoreticians, performers and writers in Zurich, Switzerland and abroad. This has meant that to date over 400 people involved in creative art have been able to enjoy the Foundation's initiatives and structures, and also that the project and everyone participating in it have made an important contribution to generating culture both in Switzerland and in the many other countries in which they operate.

It was in November 1982 that Henry F. Levy, the founder and guiding spirit of the BINZ39 Foundation, signed the first rental contract for the studios the Foundation wanted to make available to artists in Zurich, with scholarships or under conditions laid down by the Foundation. In the past 20 years, this has developed into an "enterprise" that now offers a total of 43 studios with different availability periods and emphases, located at 133 Sihlquai, 39 Binzstrasse and 45 Raeffelstrasse in Zurich and in Scuol-Nairs in the Engadine. But the BINZ39 Foundation has never restricted itself to studios alone: the exhibition space at 133 Sihlquai has for a long time now been one of Zurich's important and active exhibition venues for identifying and presenting the art that is currently being created in the city. And then there are the impressive numbers of artists involved who - under the Foundation's initiative - have either "settled" in Switzerland or Zurich, enriching Zurich's and Scuol's cultural life with many exhibitions, readings, concerts and performances, or those artists who have taken part in the exchange programmes that the Foundation has built up in England, Spain, Germany, Bulgaria, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, making contact, as elements in a through "draft", with other cultural environments, modes of expression and people who count in establishing a location's cultural climate.

As well as this, the Foundation has constantly built up its co-operation with partners: in 1990-1995 with the ARTEST Association (a joint BINZ39 Foundation operation with the Swiss Department of Foreign Affairs, the Swiss Culture Office, the Christoph Merian Foundation, the Fondation Samuel Buffet, the Künstlerhaus in Boswil and the Museo Vela), building up contacts and exchanges between artists from Switzerland and from central and eastern Europe. At the same time, BINZ39 realized projects with the RecRec recording label, offering concerts in the 133 Sihlquai events venue; the Foundation initiated studio co-operations with the PS1 Institute of Contemporary Art in New York, the Delfina Studios in London and with exchange programmes in Ireland and Madrid. In the last 3 years the Foundation has linked up with the Collegium Helveticum in Zurich to expand the interdisciplinary approach between artists and academics that it had already established for its activities.

On the occasion of the BINZ39 Foundation's "jubilee", the Kunsthalle Zürich is co-operating with the Foundation on an exhibition that also includes concerts, Performances and theoretical presentations. The project is discussing the active cultural production that studios, exchange programmes and artists' contacts can build up for people involved in art, the city, the regions and for cultural communication, making these activities central to the quality of cultural commitment, and the subject of discussions relating to that quality.

Given the impressive list of artists who have been part of the "draft" blowing through the Foundation's studios over the years, who have been involved in exhibitions or projects or who are currently "inhabiting" the studios, the exhibitions and events in the Kunsthalle Zürich can offer only a subjective and very selective cross-section of the relatively young artistic approaches that have already achieved international acclaim. This is a trail followed by 20 years of activity by the Foundation. The final symposium, "Climate", discusses achievements and also problematical aspects of such an initiative's work: what is the significance of the personal freedom offered by these subsidized studios, or those associated with scholarships. What qualities are generated by the artists' contacts with each other, and what is the position in terms of exchange and communication with the local cultural and art scene? And: what sort of local culture is best suited to contributions from studio programmes and exchange projects?